Novel Chemical Development for Post Metal Etch Clean

Advanced semiconductor manufacturing requires use of large amounts of environmentally toxic chemicals to process wafers. With advancement of technology node, demand for new chemical developments and associated risk to environment is ever increasing. In this paper, we present the development of new cleaning formulation for Back-End-of-Line post metal etch cleaning where the use of azole, a toxic chemical component, is drastically reduced. We implemented this new, environmentally friendly formulation in high volume manufacturing and achieved a cleaning efficiency and device performance comparable to the process of record formulation.